Why LEGO?

Someone's going to ask eventually, so I'll get ahead of it.

If you've looked at anything I've put out — the blog headers, the socials, the odd bit of branding — you've noticed the Lego. It's not a design gimmick. It goes back a long way.

Picture a living room in the 1980s. Wood panelling, the whole house hazy with cigarette smoke, a TV going somewhere. I've dumped an entire bin of bricks onto the floor, and I'm building a spaceship. Star Trek was probably in the back of my head, but honestly I just liked spaceships. What I remember most is trying to build a triangle out of square blocks, and I wouldn't let it go.

My grandmother was in the kitchen. My mom was downstairs. My parents were in the house. They just weren't in the room, if that makes sense.

I was asking myself why I even wanted to write about this, and honestly, I'm not sure. It's not that I'm hoping people will understand, or feel some kind of empathy for me — it really isn't a bigger story than that. I used to think the eighties were harder than today. Now I'm not so sure that's true. But hard or not, it shaped us — the good, bad, and ugly parts. I didn't have a lot of "friends" back then, not the way the movies show it, but kinda... I do recall the neighbourhood gang of friends and me out on our bikes till dark with no adult keeping track of us. Nothing close to what kids have today. But is that better? Or just different?

I don't think I wanted to raise my own kids that way. But then you reflect on how much your past shapes who you become. We hope to give our kids better than what we had — but is "better" the same as "better off"? I'm sure everyone who grew up in the eighties has their own version of that question.

Lego was there. That's the whole reason. I've gone looking for a deeper explanation, and there isn't one. It was just the thing I did for hours — figuring things out on my own, with people around but never really in the room with me.

Fast forward about thirty-five years or more.

My first company was at its peak and quietly coming apart underneath me. My marriage had just found its feet again after a separation that wasn't pretty. I sat in a chair across from someone whose job was to ask difficult questions, and she asked me about my fondest memories.

I said building Lego.

She said, So go buy some Lego.

I told her it was too expensive. Then I went out and bought some expensive Lego anyway, took it home, and started building.

I'm not going to pretend that fixed anything. It didn't. It did give me a great collection that I built on with my girls. But there's something about sitting down with a pile of parts and a problem that has an actual solution — where the pieces either fit or they don't, and no amount of stress makes a brick the wrong shape. You put your head down, and an hour later there's a thing in front of you that wasn't there before.

That's most of what I do for a living, when I think about it. Someone hands me a pile of parts that were never meant to go together and asks for a spaceship. Half the job is knowing which pieces you actually have.

So that's why Lego shows up everywhere in my work. A kid on the floor trying to make triangle-shaped spaceships out of square blocks, and a grown man who eventually figured out he never stopped.